Hugo Chávez: Portrait of A Man With Many Faces

Chávez shows Post Deputy Managing Editor Milton Coleman a tiny copy of Venezuela's constitution he carries around. (Miraflores Photo)

And finally, he threw in a little reasonable doubt. If Interpol didn't get the computers until 10 days after they were seized, who knows what might have happened in the meantime? In the end, Chávez concluded, Interpol could find no evidence that the files had been tampered with. But it also could not prove that they had not.

It was a remarkable defense, certainly unlike anything to be expected at the White House. But then who could imagine an American president taking time at a news conference to sing to a reporter. In what became a presser extraordinaire, he serenaded a blond journalist from Colombia with more than a few bars of the classic ode to her home town, "Mi Cali Bella" ("My Beautiful Cali").

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Burgundy drapes climbed halfway up the white walls to a ceiling at least 20 feet high, which seemed to rest on light blue half-columns protruding from the walls. Triads of flame-shaped bulbs glowed from the ornate sconces trimmed in gold.

We, the American editors, had entered El Despacho Presidencial, the Venezuelan equivalent of the Oval Office, for our impromptu private audience with the president, in a setting of splendor befitting Bolivarian glory. And there was the Liberator, starring down on us yet again, this time full-length and large as life.

Though he'd just finished the "gringo cop" caper and had referred to the United States snidely as "the empire," Chávez lowered his rhetorical guns and changed his tone. Another Chávez was speaking to us. A kinder and gentler Chávez? Certainly not the one who only a couple of years ago addressed the United Nations General Assembly a day after President Bush and said, "The devil came here yesterday, and it smells of sulfur still today."

He asked us to tell the people back home a different story -- that his problem is not with Yanquis in general.

"I beg for a pardon from them. I beg forgiveness if, in my words, I've hurt any feelings back in the States," he said, in a mild, measured voice. "When I speak about the United States, I do not refer to the people, to the citizens. I refer to the elite that is governing the United States. And I am not even referring to all of the elite.

"We have friends among the elite governing the United States. The economic elite, we have friends. We have friends among the cultural elite of the United States. . . . Danny Glover, Kevin Spacey came over here. Sean Penn. Those are my friends, close friends, and they are very critical as well."

Palace staffers served demitasse as Professor Chávez continued the lesson. Even though his presidency has more or less coincided with Bush's, two amigos they are not -- even though Venezuela provides about 12 percent of America's oil and the United States buys half of Venezuela's exports.

"I remember when I met George Bush for the first time," Chávez recalled. "It was in Canada at the Summit of the Americas [in April 2001]. We shook hands, and I said to him with a lot of spontaneity and sincerity -- and I know very little English, but I said this --'I want to be your friend.' "

But it never happened, despite what he describes as attempts at mediation by other countries. The chill is so deep that he said, when asked, that yes, he has "a genuine concern" that the United States might someday invade Venezuela. "We have evidence of plans that exist in this sense."